That number alone is quietly puzzling. Holy wells, sacred springs associated with a particular saint and often the focus of local pilgrimage and patterns, are common enough across Ireland, but finding three clustered together on a single hillside, two of them attributed to St Patrick and one to St Paul, is an arrangement that prompts questions the surviving record does not fully answer.

The 1840 six-inch Ordnance Survey map is the clearest evidence that these wells existed and were considered significant enough to be recorded. By the time the folklorist Caoimhín Ó Danachair visited and wrote about the site in 1955, the picture had already narrowed: he noted two wells, St Patrick's and St Paul's, on the east side of the hill, and the accompanying Ordnance Survey Letter for the area described a single spring lined with rough dry-stone walling and some remnants of old masonry. What strikes the reader of that account is a single phrase: no tradition seems to have survived. For a holy well to lose its associated stories, patron saint's day observances, and local memory is not unusual across twentieth-century Ireland, but to find it documented so plainly gives the loss a particular weight.

Access to this site today is, in practical terms, extremely difficult. The area has become densely overgrown with trees and vegetation, and it is reportedly impossible to verify the precise location of any of the wells on the ground. For anyone drawn to the eastern slopes of Knocklong hill, the landscape itself is now the main feature, a hillside that has quietly reclaimed what was once a place of local religious significance. There is nothing to see in the conventional sense, and that absence is, in its own way, the point.